by Craig Larsen
“I’m scared.”
“I know,” Sam said. “But don’t worry. No one’s going to find out. No one knows where we were today.”
“It’s not that,” Nick said.
“What?”
“What if that man followed us home?” Nick asked.
“What are you talking about?” Sam asked him. His face was a collage of shadows in the dimming light of the weak flashlight, gradually darkening as the batteries died. “He didn’t follow us anywhere. Don’t you remember what happened?”
Nick felt stunned. He wasn’t sure what his brother was asking him.
“You really don’t remember what we did?”
Nick shook his head.
“You can get in bed with me if you want.” Sam lifted the covers to let his younger brother climb into the narrow bed next to him.
“I’m scared,” Nick said. The batteries gave out before he switched the flashlight off, and Nick was still awake when the room went black.
chapter 9
A few nights after Sam’s murder, Nick woke up in a panic, certain that Sam’s mutilated body was lying in bed next to him. The room was pitch black. The dim green numerals on the old digital clock on his nightstand cast the only light in the thick, musty darkness. 4:02 A.M. The shades were pulled closed, but it would hardly have mattered had they been open. Outside the nighttime sky was heavy with storm clouds. Nick became aware of the windswept patter of rain being blown against the window glass. He reached a hand out, blindly searching beneath the covers for the corpse next to him. His heart leapt in his chest when he felt the smooth skin of Sara’s slender shoulder instead. Nick thought that it felt like ivory.
“Are you awake?” Her voice shattered the night with the intensity of a china cup dropped onto a tile floor.
“I don’t know.”
Nick was aware of the perspiration on his face before he was able to comprehend the passage of time. A light had been switched on next to the bed, revealing the dinginess of his cramped one-room apartment. Sara was sitting on the edge of the mattress next to him, peering down at him with a glass of water in her hand, concern evident on her face. Nick glanced at the clock. 4:50. Forty-five minutes had somehow disappeared.
“I was dreaming,” Nick said. “A terrible dream.”
“Here.” Nick realized that Sara was holding something toward him. A small orange tablet, barely the size of the head of a pin.
Nick shook his head. “I took one already.”
“You need to sleep, darling.” Sara set the glass down on the dresser, then placed the tranquillizer next to it. When she faced Nick again, her eyes had turned to glass. It took Nick a few beats to understand that she was crying. When she blinked, a tear tumbled down her cheek, then crystallized into a diamond on the cusp of her chin before freefalling toward the bed.
“I don’t know what’s real,” Nick said.
“The doctor said you were going to have trouble accepting Sam’s death, Nick.” Sara didn’t mean to touch his face. But she did. Her fingers were as cold as ice on his forehead, then gently gliding through his hair. “And I don’t blame you, sweetheart. It’s only been a few days. You’ve barely slept.”
Nick shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t mean that. I know that Sam’s dead.”
Sara waited for her lover to continue.
“I meant about my dream. The last few weeks, I keep having the same dream. I’m back in Madison. In Wisconsin. Sam and I are kids.”
“Shhh.” Sara was settling back into bed next to him.
“Leave the light on,” Nick said.
“I will.” Again, Sara waited for Nick to continue.
“I’m just not sure I’m dreaming.”
In his arms Nick felt Sara shiver. “What do you mean, Nick?”
“I feel like—I mean, maybe I’ve been awake. Maybe it’s not a dream.” Nick grasped the profundity of his own terror. “I can remember bits and pieces of the day. Waking up. Listening to the radio with Sam. Then walking to the lake with our skates. We played hockey for a while, and then I remember sitting on this wall to eat. I was cold. Really cold. After that, though, it’s like there’s nothing there. Except in my dream, a man approaches us. A homeless man, dressed in a long black coat. He chases us. He wants to hurt us, I think. I’m just not sure—I can’t hang on to it all at once. But maybe it’s something that really happened to me. You know, something I forgot somehow. Something I’m remembering.”
Seated on a black fiberglass chair in a precinct hallway the next morning, opposite a utilitarian, fluorescent-lit office, Nick was still turning the nightmare over in his mind. His elbows were on his knees. Detective Adam Stolie had closed the door and partially covered the glass partition separating them with a miniblind, but Nick could see the figures of the two men inside. He was barely aware of the detective, though, or of his bleak surroundings or the policemen scattered through the busy station house. In the days since his brother was killed, his mind had continued to find its way back to the snow day in Wisconsin nearly two decades before, trying to get used to this new memory. He couldn’t understand how he had been able to forget such a distinct moment in time.
Detective Stolie had brought Nick in for questioning a couple of hours before. He hadn’t arrested Nick. He had told Nick, though, that he didn’t really have a choice except to come downtown. If Nick refused, he had orders to take him into custody. Five days had passed since Sam was found murdered in the parking lot. As yet the police didn’t have leads on anyone. They had found no evidence supporting Nick’s statement that the brothers had been attacked by a vagrant man.
Stolie was speaking to his lieutenant, a silver-haired man with piercing eyes whose name Nick had failed to get when they were introduced. The lieutenant had examined Nick as they shook hands. Nick read his skepticism. The middle-aged lieutenant wasn’t buying his story. There was no vagrant. There was no group of college students getting into another car a block or two away who might vouch for Nick’s story. Nick had killed his brother, simple as that. It didn’t matter that he had been badly beaten himself. That only proved that Sam had put up a good fight. Nick had returned barefoot to the scene with blood on his hands, and the lieutenant was ready to close the investigation and bring the case to the district attorney. Every now and again, Stolie or the lieutenant would raise their voices, and Nick was able to hear bits and pieces of their conversation through the closed door.
“His fingerprints were on the knife,” the lieutenant said for the third or fourth time.
“I’m not arguing with you,” Stolie said. “I know it doesn’t look good.”
“It’s not how it looks, Stolie,” the lieutenant retorted, interrupting him. “His fingerprints were on the knife.”
“I was there. You weren’t. I saw his face. He didn’t kill his brother.”
“Since when did you become a shrink? It’s not just his brother we’re talking about here, and you know it. A month ago, it was that prostitute—Claire Scott.” Claire Scott had last been seen alive working the streets on First Avenue two days before her body had been found. “Our boy Nick was the first one there at the crime scene that day, too. Down on the Green River, right where Ridgway used to dump his victims, rocks shoved up their vaginas. Am I right? And then last week it was that bum behind the Safeway. You’re the investigating officer. Still no leads, I take it.”
“Dickenson, yeah,” Stolie said. “The guy was homeless.” He shook his head. “It’s pretty hard to follow his tracks.”
“Our boy Nicholas was right on top of that one, too. Wasn’t he?”
Stolie straightened and looked the lieutenant in the eye. “He’s a photographer. That’s what he gets paid for, to get to crime scenes before we rope them off.”
“All I’m saying is, keep your guard up. Think about it. He’s been a thorn in our side for the last couple of years. Someone gets killed, and he’s there with his camera ten minutes later. Like magic.” Shifting on the edge of his desk, the lieutenant fo
lded his arms across his chest and nodded toward Nick. “For all we know at this point, we’ve got the Street Butcher sitting out there in the hallway. Under our noses.”
Stolie’s voice remained patient. “All we’ve got right now are three unrelated homicides. A prostitute, a bum, and Nick’s brother.”
“What we have, my friend, are the makings of a serial murder spree. What we have is a city that’s starting to get scared.”
“You really see a connection between the crimes?”
“You don’t? Three people stabbed multiple times. Not murdered—butchered. Three ugly homicides with a link to street people.” The lieutenant assessed his subordinate with a long look. “You’ve got a hunch this boy’s telling the truth, okay. But why stick your neck out? Because it’s your neck you’re sticking out, Stolie, and mine with it.”
Stolie stood up straight. “Listen, you take what we’ve got to the DA, and he’s not going to be able to get the charge to stick. Nick got pretty badly banged up. We’ve got nothing at this point. About all we’ve got are his fingerprints.”
“On the knife.”
“He could have grabbed the knife.” Stolie waved his hands in disgust. “Maybe he tried to pull it out of his brother’s chest. The DA will throw an arrest right back into our faces. We don’t even know what we’ve got here ourselves yet.”
The lieutenant let the detective’s objections hang in the air, listening with a cynical smile.
“All I’m saying is give it a few days.” Stolie refused to accede to the lieutenant’s rank. “Let’s see what we can turn up first. There’s Sam Wilder’s partner—Blake Werner—for one thing. The guy seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. We can’t even find him. Coincidence? I don’t think so, and the DA’s office is not going to think so, either. They’re going to want to know we’ve questioned him. Our case isn’t complete until we bring him in.”
The lieutenant pushed away from his desk. “You’ve got two days, Detective. Two days, that’s it. And then we arrest the brother.”
Stolie walked briskly to the door and whipped it open. His eyes connected with Nick’s as he stopped to pull the door closed behind him, and Nick wondered why this man believed him. It was clear that he didn’t like the heat he was taking from the lieutenant.
“I don’t have enough to book you,” the detective said, his agitation rupturing his reserve. He eyed Nick as he stood up from the chair. “I’m going to let you go. You stay close, though, you hear?”
Nick nodded his agreement.
“I’m on a short leash with this, understand? That means you’re on an even shorter one.” The detective’s nostrils flared. “I know how crazy this all must seem to you right now. Your brother hasn’t even been buried yet, and here we are putting you through this. But you’re in serious trouble, okay?” He took a breath, then went on more slowly. “You got anywhere you can go? Someone you can go to for help, I mean.”
Nick thought about the question. He hadn’t put it into words before: He was by himself now. “My parents died when I was seventeen. In a car accident.” His father had driven their Chevy Impala head-on into a sixteen-wheel truck. His parents’ remains had been unrecognizable. “Sam and I were alone. He was all I had left.”
Stolie looked away from him, then turned back and placed a hand on Nick’s shoulder. He took another deep breath, and when he next spoke, his voice had softened noticeably. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. “Now get yourself out of here. Go on home. There’s nothing for you to do here, and I’ve got to get to work or we’ll both be in trouble.”
Nick was exiting the station house when a thought occurred to him, and he retraced his steps. He had to ask one of the officers where Stolie had gone. He found him at a desk, about to make a phone call. “What about my shoes?” he said.
Stolie hadn’t seen him approach, and he looked up at Nick in surprise. “What’s that?”
“My shoes,” Nick said again. “I was wearing a pair of black and orange Nike running shoes. Did you ever find them?”
The detective didn’t respond.
“Did you search for them?”
“Not specifically,” the detective said. “But we combed the area pretty thoroughly, all the way to Elliott Bay Park—where you said you woke up. Next to the gravel dock.” He looked pensively at Nick. “Why?”
“You don’t think it’s weird?”
Stolie shrugged. “Maybe this guy you say attacked you tossed them into the bay. Maybe they sank.”
Nick considered the thought. “Yeah, maybe,” he said. Then he headed back out into the corridor.
“Listen,” Stolie called out after him. “You remember anything, you let me know. As fast as possible. Understand?”
chapter 10
Nick had forgotten all about his lunch appointment with Laura Daly. He wasn’t hungry, and the last thing on his mind was the Seattle Telegraph. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket as he was stepping down the worn concrete staircase from the precinct house. He stopped to pull it from his pocket, taking refuge from a lightly falling rain beneath the branches of an old, gnarled maple tree, aware of the sound of raindrops tapping against its desiccated brown and orange leaves.
“Nick? It’s Delilah. From Laura Daly’s office.”
“Delilah, yes,” Nick said. A car sped past. A small whirlwind trailed in its wake, sending a blast of cool, wet air against his face. “Sorry. I’m in the street. It’s a bit difficult to hear.”
“That’s okay,” Delilah said. “I understand.”
Nick cringed at the consideration in the woman’s voice. More than anything else since Sam’s death, that’s what he had come to resent: everyone’s goddamned superficial pity.
“Ms. Daly asked me to call. She wanted me to remind you that you have a lunch scheduled today at noon.”
“Is that today?”
“Yes.” Delilah paused. “Ms. Daly thought you might have forgotten.”
“It’s at Enrico’s, isn’t it?”
“At the Metropolitan Café. Laura is already there, waiting for you.”
After hanging up the call, Nick stared at the phone for a few seconds, until a cascade of cold and heavy raindrops spilled off the leaves above his head, sinking through his hair and running icily down his cheeks.
Ten minutes later, Nick was seated across a table from the senior editor of the Seattle Telegraph in a crowded restaurant downtown, a couple of blocks from the newspaper office. Half the bistro’s clientele worked for the paper, and the room had fallen silent when Nick pulled the glass door open and stepped inside. Everyone had stopped eating, seemingly in unison, to look up at him and then over at Daly.
“You got us some pretty good pictures of the Claire Scott murder a few weeks back,” Laura Daly was saying. They were seated at a table next to the front window. The crowded restaurant was so old that its floors were uneven and the tabletops were out of plane. Nick glanced at the party next to them, wishing that Daly would lower her voice, aware that people were listening. “It’s a shame how gory the murder was. You know, we ended up having to go with some stock photos—an old mug shot from last year when the police picked her up for soliciting. The stuff you brought back—” Daly stopped short and shook her head. “Christ. It was too grisly to print. Stabbed twenty-one times, right?”
“Twenty-three,” Nick said.
“And then the bite marks.” The editor’s disgust was visible in her expression. The police had determined that the killer had bitten her. Not hard enough to pierce her skin and leave evidence they could use to identify the killer. No teeth marks they could match with any certainty to a dental plate. Hard enough, though, to have disfigured her with bruising.
“It was pretty unsettling,” Nick admitted.
“And then last week it was the same thing. With that other murder. The hobo they found in the Safeway parking lot.”
“Dickenson,” Nick said.
“Yeah, Dickenson. He was stabbed more than twenty times, too, right?”
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“Twenty-six,” Nick confirmed.
“And then sliced up with a broken beer bottle? And his left hand. Jesus.”
Nick closed his eyes, and his head was filled with the image of the bum’s hand, shredded into a hundred slivers of flesh.
Nick was standing over the remains of Dickenson’s body, shielding his camera from the rain, framing a shot. The corpse had been found in a Dumpster behind the Safeway on Fifth Street, just a few blocks from the Telegraph building. The police had opened the lid of the Dumpster in the morning after they arrived on the scene. Two hours later, the runoff from the roof of the supermarket had filled the bin, and the bloated body was floating in filth, pulled by a weak current to the edge where a few holes had rusted through the steel. The dead man’s blood had turned the water seeping down the side of the Dumpster weakly red. Stepping back from the corpse, Nick snapped a quick picture of the pink water puddling at the feet of a uniformed cop.
When Nick looked back up at the Dumpster, he noticed the man’s shredded hand for the first time. It had been submerged beneath the corpse, but with the water rising inside the bin, the body had twisted and the torn, gruesome arm floated in bits and pieces to the surface. Nick had opened his mouth to ask the cop how Dickenson had died. He shook his head instead, turning away from the body.
“You got what you need here?”
Nick looked up at Detective Stolie. He hadn’t seen him approach. “Just one more,” he said. “Give me a second.”
As Nick was putting his camera back into his bag, he glanced up at the crowd gathered behind the police tape about ten yards back from the crime scene, and a familiar face caught his eye. By the time that he reached the small crowd, though, the boy was gone.
Nick tracked him down the next day.
“So you’re Daniel Scott? Your mother was Claire Scott?”